I am studying BBH - Basics Of Biblical Hebrew by Miles Van Pelt and Pratico

On Page 157, for Paal Perfect

He has some headings

Geminate strong, Geminate weak 1, Geminate weak 2.

As in, a strong geminate, and 2 variations for when a weak geminate.

He calls Samech Vet Vet an example of Geminate Strong

Then he an example of Geminate weak 1 - he gives Aleph reish reish (to curse)

And for geminate weak 2 he gives Tav Mem Mem (to be finished)

It's not clear to me why he labels one strong, and others weak.

I know strong and weak in the sense of, when a root contains a particular letter in a particular position, but i'm not sure whether biconsonentals and geminates would be considered weak, particularly some geminates weak and some not.

He seems to refer to Biconsonantals as strong in the case when they don't end in an aleph or heh, and weak when they do.. That makes some sense. But I can't see any logic behind what makes a geminate strong or weak.

Biblical Hebrew didn’t have a “perfect”. “Perfect” is connected with tense, but Biblical Hebrew didn’t have any conjugations with any connection with time; neither tense nor aspect. This is a red flag.

ralph wrote:He has some headings

Geminate strong, Geminate weak 1, Geminate weak 2.

As in, a strong geminate, and 2 variations for when a weak geminate.

What you have is that in some roots, it appears that the doubling of the second letter is part of the root, always present.

I haven’t really made a study of the following, so what follows are some comments of observations that have raised questions in my mind. I don’t have the following written out with examples, so what follows are just thoughts written off the top of my head.

There is a theory, which I think is wrong, that all Biblical Hebrew roots had three letters. I see examples that seem to have two letters, and a very few that have four letters. So grammarians have added letters to the two letter roots in order to list them as three letter roots.

For some of those two letter roots, grammarians added a medial yod or waw. I suspect that a few that are listed as a final heh were also two letter roots. And some of the roots that have a doubled second letter also were originally two letter roots. As I wrote above, this is just observations without having made detailed study.

As for what makes a weak or strong geminate, I have no idea. Does it make a difference in meaning when one reads Tanakh for understanding? If not, why not ignore them?

You've raised an interesting point. In my view, the paradigm chart on page 157 is confusing. Earlier in the textbook, the authors are clear that all geminate verbs are weak (p. 132, para. 12.12). I've looked in several other grammars and they all treat geminate verbs as weak. The only rationale I can think of for describing סממ as a strong geminate is because it is the archetypal pattern (often used in other grammars) and perhaps what Practico and Pelt refer to as the weak 1 and weak 2 paradigms are simply variations on the more common paradigm. None of the other grammars I looked at divide geminates into the three categories used by P&P.

Have you seen the course lectures available at no cost on iTunesU? There is one which covers an introductory Biblical Hebrew course based upon the Practico and Pelt textbook.

Thanks.. And Schubert, I think you're right.. all geminates are weak.. I spoke to a biblical hebrew teacher and they said weak verbs are when one or more root letters, cause them to be weak.. e.g. the case of geminates aka double ayin verbs. I have recently run into a really neat biblical hebrew book by an author called Hostetter, ch25 p104 that lists 10 types of weak verbs, amongst them, geminates. And is really systematic describing weak verbs. And then I checked Gesenius, which is too hard for me to read but I was able to count the types of weak verbs he had and he had 10 types too.